My Tool Review is going to seem a bit graphic heavy, but that’s to show you the interface of a pretty cool tool: Quizlet.
During the course of my independent learning for Online Pedagogy, I’ve had the opportunity to peruse materials posted by students from the spring semester course. I enjoyed their write-ups of different tools. Going in and actually playing with one is completely different from reading another person’s experience or recommendations.
Quizlet is a great tool that has a few easy to implement functions. Until you play with it, invest a bit of time, you might think it is just going to help you build and deploy quizzes. But, it is so much more than that. It’s also quite fun.
In order to evaluate the product, I made just four entries, then saved my work and tried out the options. See the bottom of this write up for my four entries.
Good
- Great visual interface
- Several ways for students to interact with the material that you enter in once (image two)
- Students get rewards and updates on how they are doing (image three)
Bad
- I understand about selling, but I’m not a fan of the very first thing being a sale’s pitch (image one)
- Perhaps not all that bad, but you have to dig in a bit to get an idea of how many options a student has (they may lose some instructors in the first 30-60 seconds)
image one: try to sell me the upgrade before I’ve even seen the product…
Interface options for students:
- Flashcards – exactly what you might think
- Learn – information presented in a ‘pretest’ way
- Speller – it speaks, you type (what a great way to get a person to connect to what they are reading and hearing kinetic learning)
- Test – the actual quiz, it’s timed and it tells you how you are doing as you go; great buzz when you’ve got them all right (image four)
- Scatter – wonderful visual interface to play with the information presented and learn more by quickly matching (again a bit of an endorphin buzz to clear the screen or beat your own time – see timer top right image five)
- Space Race – I did not check
image two – dashboard interface (notice the advertisement on the side)
The testing interface shows progress and provides a reward upon completion.
image three – fun video “reward” for getting everything right
Note the video… it’s a bit dark, but it was a quick video of a derby – that’s a reward, but also the visual bars in the top left, completion and how many correct.
SCATTER (play)
image four: you need to match up items, and then they disappear
Image five: you are presented with results AND a call to action “beat that time!”
Who wouldn’t take on that challenge?
FLASHCARDS
There are multiple views for the student to see and study from.
image six: just one of the flashcard views (showing both the term and the definition for studying purposes). Two other view options show you the front or the back and you flip when you are ready.
MY ENTRIES
My course has students learn how to hand-code HTML and CSS as well as how to build and interact with their own WordPress site.
- Term: HTML – Definition: HyperText Markup Language is the code you use to mark up content for a web browser to display it.
- Term: POST – Definition: Written commentary you save and display on your own web log (blog)
- Term: Dashboard – Definition: The interface for you, as a developer, to see the contents of your blog
- Term: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 – Definition: A series of commands, also known as tags, that allow you to display headline text in a hierarchical way.
In response to the prompts given: I found this tool very easy to use (quick learning curve); the time required to create a product was minimal (5-10 minutes); I’ve detailed most of the key features above; the only problem I encountered was one screen trying to upsale me prior to my seeing the product (more of a pet peeve than a problem); this tool would be great for studying and encouraging play that assists learning.